The tycoon at the typewriter

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While his empire struggles, Conrad Black has been losing sleep over a book. Andrew Billen suspects Kanes syndrome

Lord Black of Crossharbour notes that we have fallen into a rather enjoyable parlour game: comparing people against Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thirty-second President of the United States. The fun of this game, as played by Conrad Black’s rules, is that no one does compare with him — except, that is, unfavourably.

The owner of TheDaily Telegraph is the wartime President’s latest, most exhaustive, biographer. His book concludes that FDR was the greatest person of the 20th century — a surprising accolade, perhaps, for a conservative newspaper proprietor to bestow on a President who spent millions of federal dollars putting